The Golden Ticket

Wexford Festival Opera

Wexford Festival Opera has long been a festival full of unknowns. It has made a speciality of unearthing long-neglected works from the highways and byways of operatic history.

It has also sustained an enviable reputation for giving an important early platform to young talent, and effectively launching operatic careers.

But few of its unknowns have been as unknown as Peter Ash's The Golden Ticket, which opened on Sunday night. Ash is a living composer, and his Golden Ticket, with a libretto by Donald Sturrock after Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had its première as recently as last June, when it was presented by Opera Theatre St Louis, with which the Wexford Festival has an ongoing co-production partnership – the likely St Louis collaboration for next year would seem to be John Adams's Death of Klinghoffer.

It's easy to see how the project might have been expected to press all the right buttons. Recognition of Dahl and Willie Wonka's chocolate factory would be incredibly wide. The project had the backing of the writer's widow, Felicity. Ash is an experienced conductor with a track record in contemporary opera. He also works with young people, as artistic director of the London Schools' Symphony Orchestra, and The Golden Ticketis not his first opera.

But The Golden Ticketas seen and heard at Wexford falls between a number of stools.

The busy, often frenetic production, directed by James Robinson, with sets by Bruno Schwengl, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz and video by Greg Emetaz, suffered from overkill. The aim, it seemed, was to leave nothing to the imagination.

Ash’s music spends a lot of time in busy orchestral prattle, but his vocal writing seems to aspire to the directness of a Broadway musical.

The mixture is musically uncomfortable, with instrumental fussiness getting in the way of vocal lines and words.

From my seat at the extreme right of the stalls, the decorative dissonances of the orchestral writing were like a fog that could obscure the efforts of any of the singers (even the amplified Charlie of boy soprano Michael Kepler Meo), and the sound of the brass under conductor Timothy Redmond too often became simply overbearing.

Musically, the best moments came in the second act, where the chorus of Oompa Loompas were given the opportunity to get their teeth into some directly effective choral writing.

None of the evening’s musical weakness seemed ascribable to the cast, who gave everything their considerable all, with Kiera Duffy’s Violet Beauregard, Abigail Nims’s Veruca Salt and Miriam Murphy’s Mrs Gloop taking the vertiginous vocal demands in their stride.

Wayne Tigges’s Willy Wonka functioned as a kind of slightly bemused compère, and Michael Kepler Meo’s Charlie showed clear-voiced savoir-faire, and kept his cool to be rewarded with the chocolate factory of his dreams.